Broadcast programming is the practice of scheduling broadcast media shows, typically radio and television, in a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or season-long schedule.

Modern broadcasters use broadcast automation to regularly change the scheduling of their shows to build an audience for a new show, retain that audience, or compete with other broadcasters' shows. Most broadcast television shows are presented weekly in prime time or daily in other dayparts, though there are many exceptions.

At a micro level, scheduling is the minute planning of the transmission; what to broadcast and when, ensuring an adequate or maximum utilization of airtime. Television scheduling strategies are employed to give shows the best possible chance of attracting and retaining an audience. They are used to deliver shows to audiences when they are most likely to want to watch them and deliver audiences to advertisers in the composition that makes their advertising most likely to be effective.

With the growth of digital platforms and services allowing non-linear, on-demand access to television content, this approach to broadcasting has since been referred to using the retronym linear (such as linear television and linear channels).

With the beginning of scheduled television in 1936, television programming was initially only concerned with filling a few hours each evening – the hours now known as prime time. Over time, though, television began to be seen during the daytime and late at night, as well on the weekends. As air time increased, so did the demand for new material. With the exception of sports television, variety shows became much more important in prime time.

Broadcasters may schedule a program to air before or after a widely viewed tent-pole program, such as a popular series, or a special such as a high-profile sporting event (such as, in the United States, the Super Bowl), in the hope that audience flow will encourage the audience to tune-in early or stay for the second program. The second program is usually one that the broadcaster wants to promote to a wider audience, such as a new or lower-profile series. Sometimes, a lower-profile program may be scheduled between two tentpole programs, a technique known as hammocking.

In some cases, a lead-in may be an episode of a series that has a tie-in or relevance to the lead-out. In May 2025, the BBC scheduled the Doctor Who episode "The Interstellar Song Contest"—which is themed after the Eurovision Song Contest—as a lead-in to its live broadcast of the 2025 edition. The episode was, in turn, aired after the 2025 FA Cup final; the hammocking of the episode between two live events proved to be risky for the BBC, with Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies expressing concern that the episode could have been preempted if the FA Cup match went to extra time. However, this did not prove to be the case, and the episode was the third-highest rated program of the night, behind only the FA Cup and Eurovision themselves.

Lead-outs can sometimes help to launch new programs and talent; in 1982, NBC premiered Late Night with David Letterman as a lead-out for its long-running late-night talk show The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Characterized by an off-beat style appealing to young adults, Late Night helped launch the career of host David Letterman, and influence later entries into the genre. Despite Carson's endorsement of Letterman as a successor following his 1992 retirement, NBC chose Jay Leno instead, and Letterman departed for CBS to host a spiritual successor—Late Show with David Letterman—beginning in the 1993–94 season. Late Night would continue as a franchise with hosts such as Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Fallon—both of whom would later go on to host The Tonight Show. In 2005, the first season of The Ultimate Fighter—a reality competition series following mixed martial arts fighters competing for a contract in the UFC—aired on Spike TV as a lead-out to the professional wrestling series WWE Raw; the program pulled 36% higher viewership than Spike's prior programming in the post-Raw timeslot, and retained 57% of the Raw audience among young adult males.